It must be wonderful to be seventeen, and to know everything.
Interpretation
The quote humorously reflects the confidence and perceived omniscience of adolescence.
Arthur C. Clarke's quote highlights the often exaggerated self-assurance and belief in one's knowledge that comes with being seventeen. It points out the irony of youth, suggesting that while teenagers may feel invincible and all-knowing, true wisdom often comes with age and experience.
In practice
During a graduation speech to highlight the idealism of youth.
Nowhere in space will we rest our eyes upon the familiar shapes of trees and plants, or any of the animals that share our world. Whatsoever life we meet will be as strange and alien as the nightmare creatures of the ocean abyss, or of the insect empire whose horrors are normally hidden from us by their microscopic scale.
As our own species is in the process of proving, one cannot have superior science and inferior morals. The combination is unstable and self-destroying.
It has yet to be proven that intelligence has any survival value.
The best measure of a man's honesty isn't his income tax return. It's the zero adjust on his bathroom scale.
It was the mark of a barbarian to destroy something one could not understand.
My favorite definition of an intellectual: 'Someone who has been educated beyond his/her intelligence'.
Healthy scepticism is the basis of all accurate observation.
Remind yourself that the greatest technique for bringing peace into your life is to always choose being kind when you have a choice between being right or being kind.
Convince yourself that you are working in clay, not marble, on paper not eternal bronze: Let that first sentence be as stupid as it wishes.
Escape from the black cloud that surrounds you. _x000D_ Then you will see your own light as radiant as the full moon.
Truth is the ultimate power. When the truth comes around, all the lies have to run and hide.
What a man can be, he must be. This need we call self-actualizat ion.
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